Prayer seems to me to be bound up with purpose. Whether the purpose is known or not, prayer seems to be, for the most part, a driven thing, and a driver, too.
-Stephen Jenkinson
This past Summer, Stephen Jenkinson and Dr. Martin Shaw met in Devon at St. Mary’s Chapel in Totnes for the first time in many years, this time to speak about Prayer.
There were over 300 people in the pews that evening, and I’m told it’s the most that Chapel has seen in many years too. Plus, there were another 400 folks that wrote in to us requesting a recording if such a thing was to be made available.
We’ve decided to let the wondrous words spoken between them that evening be. There will be no produced recording nor access to the full transcription at this time.
This letter comes to you with a few glimpses captured that evening in the form of photography and three excerpts of the transcription.
Jenkinson: I’m wondering, you know, Martin, can you tell me if you can pray by accident, or without knowing, or meaning to, or is it all, after all, intention?
Shaw: I love, like Leonard Cohen and yourself, old ideas, so this is an old idea. The old idea is that certain prayers are by rote, repetition and diligence. They’re like going out to attend to the field. Our mutual friend Robert Bly, he used to talk about his dad Jacob, and he said every morning his father would go out to attend to the fields and look in the barn. It just put him in a good mood but there was no real integral reason to do it. He needed to see it and he felt that the animals needed to see him. John Moriarty’s dad felt the same. The animals needed to see him. So, there’s something about turning up. There’s something about the diligence of a certain kind of prayer, a rule for life, in fact. It’s great to say I’m going to sit down and have a real look at why I’m so addicted to disorder. Why do I fetishize it? In an early book, I said, wildness is the dance partner of discipline, but certainly in the west, we’ve been very guilty of forgetting the discipline.
Can prayer happen by accident? I hope so. I hesitate to say this because it sounds like a Facebook meme, but prayer is initially something you do and is finally something you become. You know, the first thing that I did? The priest suggested to change where I slept in my house. He said, you’ve got to face east. I live in this wonderful house but moved into in the smallest, most circumspect room, entirely because it faces east and when God comes, he’s coming from the east. He is the Sun rising, don’t miss it. Prayer is more and more about a certain kind of consciousness.
Jenkinson: One of the things that prompts me is to wonder aloud about the.., how prayer finds itself with discipline and what discipline does to prayer. So, I’d like to suggest to you, something that, you know, could be useful someday. Discipline, of course, has a parental overtone to it now and it has a sense of part sacrifice, part bullying, isn’t it? partly knowing everything and proceeding accordingly, part ordering things about, and so on. But the etymology of discipline absolutely banishes any of those nuances. Discipline seems to me to be something very, well, disciple, of course, is the same root.
And the ‘sc’ in there is the real root. It’s the same root as scissors and decisive and science. Just to take three that I can think of now. All of them seem to point in this direction, Discipline. This is a kind of order, bordering on rigour, that you take upon yourself, not necessarily willingly, but you do so nonetheless in the name of the love you claim to bear for that one that you would propose to learn from.
And so maybe it’s so, that prayer is a way of submitting counterintuitively. Yeah, at least that’s what I think now.
Shaw: I was on this Irish island – Inis Oirr – on vigil in the remains of a monastic cell of a bee maiden, St. Gobnait, and it was on that island that I got the news about what was happening in your life. I talked to the old women of the island, these incorrigible lovelies and I said, what would I ever have to say to Stephen about prayer? And they said, ‘well, we want to give him something.’ And so what I have, I have here now.
Now, this really is a thing of beauty. This is called a criss and this is a way of praying. They wrap it around the belly. This woven belt, they traditionally make it for their men, the bold fishermen. When they’re heading out into very deep waters, this is an act of love: there’s an act of prayer bound around their stomachs, it identifies them and also it claims them. It claims them.
And in some raggle-taggle way, we claim you as much as we can, in all our inefficiencies and our madness. We love you. We love your craic. We love your irascibility. We love your strangeness. We love your goodness. We love your absences. We love the whole mother loving bit of you and so with the women from the Island, who also claim you as one of their sons, I’ll give this to you.
Jenkinson: I just count my good fortune that I lived long enough, but not too long and that my long enough included learning of the likes of people such as Martin and that they, for a while, decided to have me alongside them, which is exceedingly rare. Good people.
A Grand Thanks,
Khadija Striegel
Orphan Wisdom Manager
khadija@orphanwisdom.com